LA SALLE COUNTY — The Railroad Commission of Texas says every major source of flaring in the oil patch goes through a permitting process that requires energy companies to explain why natural gas can’t be collected from a well.

Even if a company flares without permission, officials say their computer system automatically catches the violation.

“Our trained staff works closely with operators to ensure compliance with commission rules,” the agency states on a web page it published to address questions about flaring.

Yet in scores of cases in the Eagle Ford Shale, that oversight never happened.

Some of the top flaring sites in South Texas failed to ask the Railroad Commission for permission to flare, records show, even as they wasted more than a billion cubic feet of gas in 2012.

That’s enough gas to fuel CPS Energy’s O.W. Sommers power plant in San Antonio for a month of peak summer demand.

The Railroad Commission didn’t notice the missing requests until the San Antonio Express-News asked for copies of permits for the 20 Eagle Ford leases that flared and vented the most gas in 2012.

State officials said seven of the 20 leases lacked necessary flaring permits. The agency later fined two companies more than $60,000 and is considering taking enforcement action against the others.

The lack of flaring permits was news to Barry Smitherman, chairman of the Railroad Commission’s three-member board.

“That surprises me,” Smitherman said. “We get a report from the executive director at every one of our meetings about the progress to be made in processing permits of all kinds.

“Everyone should follow the rules. There should be no exceptions.”

Milton Rister, the Railroad Commission’s executive director, blamed the problem on a flood of drilling paperwork that swamped the agency.

“The Eagle Ford Shale was an unexpected boom for South Texas and the state,” Rister said. “And you know, it creates some technology and staffing challenges for us.”

Rister said the agency was taking steps to deal with its backlog and identify companies that have failed to apply for state-mandated flaring permits.

He said the commission conducted its own analysis of flaring data in December 2012 and found 82 companies in the shale region of South Texas and other parts of the state had failed to apply for flaring approvals.

The Railroad Commission threatened to shut those wells if companies didn’t follow state flaring regulations, Rister said, and all the companies eventually complied.

Since then, the agency has stepped up its efforts to bring companies into compliance.

In 2013, officials sent 212 warning notices to potential flaring violators. In the first six months of this year, they have sent 480 notices. Most companies complied with the flaring rules, according to the Railroad Commission.

“We can’t deny that we’ve had some backlogs,” Rister said. “But we’ve been working very aggressively on reducing those backlogs.”

Most of the oil and gas operations that lacked flaring permits were in La Salle County, where energy companies flared and vented more gas in 2012 than any other county in Texas.

At the Briggs Ranch south of the county seat of Cotulla on Interstate 35, Hess Corp. flared 360 million cubic feet of gas from multiple wells next to the camping and hunting grounds of the Chaparral Wildlife Management Area, a rustic property owned by the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife that is surrounded by drilling activity.

“There are smog days down here,” Chaparral Manager Stephen Lange said. “It can get just as smoggy in the big city, and you’re out in the middle of nowhere.”

The Railroad Commission said Hess Corp. hadn’t applied for any flaring permits at the site.

“As this is currently being reviewed by the Railroad Commission, it would be inappropriate for us to comment on it at this time,” Hess spokesman John Roper told the San Antonio Express-News in an email. The company sold its operations at Briggs Ranch to another company in 2013.

A week after the Express-News interviewed Rister and Smitherman, Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick, who was speaking at an oil and gas industry event in Houston, warned the agency would start enforcing its flaring rules.

She said the Eagle Ford was a particular area of concern, and the agency in February sent letters to operators to remind them of flaring regulations.

Those rules came from hard-fought litigation in the 1940s when the Railroad Commission cracked down on wasteful flaring in Texas oil fields.

Under state regulations, energy companies can flare for 10 days after a well is completed. After that, they must apply for a permit if they flare more than 50,000 cubic feet of gas per day — roughly the annual usage of an average San Antonio household.

Companies must explain why flaring is necessary and demonstrate they’re making a “good faith effort” to address the problem.

The flaring permit allows energy producers to flare for 45 days and can be renewed three times, up to 180 days. After that, companies must request a hearing with the Railroad Commission.

But even if Hess and other companies had applied for flaring permits, there’s no indication they would have been turned down. State officials can’t offer a single example of ever denying a request to flare natural gas — even for companies that want to flare longer than 180 days.

Tom “Smitty” Smith, state director of the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, said the missing flaring permits merely are a symptom of a larger problem: Texas’ lackluster oversight of the oil and gas industry.

“It’s the classic hear no evil, smell no evil, say no evil, period, about regulation in Texas,” Smith said.

Frenetic drilling in the Eagle Ford since 2009 sparked a surge in gas production — more than 3 trillion cubic feet. But many companies drilling in the shale in rural South Texas had no easy way to collect the irreplaceable natural resource.

While oil can be transported by tanker trucks, natural gas needs to be transported through pipelines to processing plants, which are time consuming and expensive to build. Even in some areas with existing infrastructure, skyrocketing gas production overwhelmed the system.

Energy producers dealt with the problem by building tall metallic structures known as flare stacks. Gas flows up the stacks and pilot lights on top ignite it, creating columns of fire. The heat burns impurities in the gas and transforms it to carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that scientists say contributes to climate change.

Then the burned gas is released into the Texas sky.

Sometimes, raw gas is accidentally vented, unburned, straight into the air. The primary component of raw natural gas is methane, which traps 20 times as much heat as does carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere.

While Railroad Commission officials say it’s better to collect a natural resource than let it go to waste, questions about the agency’s ability — and willingness — to police the oil and gas industry have long dogged it.

The Railroad Commission is the only state agency overseen by a board of three commissioners who run for political office and accept campaign contributions from the very industry they’re supposed to regulate.

“Elected officials rely on campaign contributions to seek office, re-election or otherwise, creating an opportunity for regulated entities to provide campaign contributions to commissioners they believe will be sympathetic to their issues,” states a 2013 report by the Sunset Advisory Commission, which reviews the operations of state agencies in Texas.

The three Railroad Commissioners have raised $11 million from campaign donors since 2010. At least half that money came from employees, lobbyists and lawyers connected to the oil and gas industry, according to campaign finance records.

As flares spread across the Eagle Ford and released greenhouse gases, Smitherman publicly dismissed concerns about climate change over the past year during a failed campaign to be the next Texas attorney general.

In speeches and on his campaign website, the oil and gas regulator criticized “global warming alarmists” and the Obama administration’s efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

“It cracks me up to hear environmental wackos talk about global warming,” Smitherman was quoted as saying by the Burleson Star newspaper during a speech he gave to the Reagan Legacy Republican Women near Dallas last year. “The real issue is American energy dependence.”

While attending a conference nearly a month later in July 2013, Smitherman wrote on Twitter: “Don’t be fooled — not everyone believes in global warming.”

Smitherman’s comments conflict with the vast majority of climate scientists who agree the earth is warming and that human activity is largely to blame.

“This agreement is documented not just by a single study, but by a converging stream of evidence over the past two decades from surveys of scientists, content analysis of peer-reviewed studies and public statements issued by virtually every membership organization of experts in this field,” states a 2014 report about the dangers of climate change published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In an interview with the Express-News, Smitherman struck a softer tone while still expressing doubts about the impact of carbon dioxide pollution on the earth’s climate.

“It used to be ‘global warming,’” Smitherman said. “Now they changed it to ‘climate change’ so that they can attempt to use it to blame everything that happens, whether it’s Super Storm Sandy or more snow storms or less hurricanes or whatever.”

Asked whether he viewed flaring as a problem given his skepticism about climate change, Smitherman said the principle goal of the Railroad Commission is avoiding waste. Smitherman called natural gas “a wonderful commodity,” noting “it’s the cleanest of all fossil fuels.”

“We want to get as much pipeline built and interconnected to the wellhead as we can in order to reduce flaring and get this valuable commodity to market,” Smitherman said. “That’s the ultimate solution.”

Flaring without a permit can potentially lead to a $10,000 per-day fine. But in practice, the Railroad Commission rarely pursues such penalties.

Between 2010 and 2012, inspectors found more than 1,150 possible flaring or venting violations across the state, including 154 in Eagle Ford counties, according to public records requests and an Express-News analysis of the commission’s enforcement data.

The data don’t show how many violations resulted in financial penalties. But agency spokeswoman Ramona Nye told the Express-News that in most cases, the Railroad Commission threatens to shut down oil and gas operations to bring them into compliance.

“One of the first steps the commission takes before pursuing enforcement action is to notify the operator that its lease will be sealed, which would effectively prevent that operator from transporting oil or gas or receiving waste from a lease,” Nye wrote in an email.

The problem with this approach, according to the Sunset Commission, is that it does little to deter repeat offenders.

“The commission pursues enforcement action in a very small percentage of the thousands of violations its inspectors identify each year,” the Sunset Review found. “Part of the reason for the large number of violations is that the commission’s enforcement process is not structured to deter repeat violations. The commission also struggles to present a clear picture of its enforcement activities, frustrating the public.”

In the field, inspectors have found unlit flare stacks, leaking gas lines, stuck valves and wells with open casings that all vented raw gas into the atmosphere.

In some cases, the vented gas was not being measured, so there’s no way to know how much was lost.

The Railroad Commission has nearly doubled the number of inspectors since 2009. Its 159 inspectors in 2013 conducted 125,000 inspections — about 786 per person.

Nye said the agency does an effective job with its existing resources, but plans to ask for more inspectors during the 2015 Legislative session.

Commission inspectors caught some energy companies flaring gas without a permit. Others, such as the Hess site in La Salle County, escaped notice as they flared without the necessary approvals.

But unapproved flaring isn’t supposed to happen at all.

The Eagle Ford Shale Task Force Report — issued last year by a 24-member group organized by Railroad Commissioner David Porter — assured concerned residents that flaring doesn’t occur without the permission of regulators.

The report described an automated computer program that flags excessive amounts of flaring in monthly production reports filed by energy companies.

“If flared or vented amounts of gas are reported above the level requiring a permit, another automated check is performed to verify the existence of a permit to flare or vent,” the report says. “If no permit exists, the lease is held in violation.”

That scenario didn’t happen at scores of drilling operations in the Eagle Ford Shale.

At a remote rural property that spans the border of Karnes and Live Oak counties, wells operated by Dallas energy company Cinco Natural Resources Corp. produced more than 620 million cubic feet of gas in 2012. But the company flared or vented nearly 60 percent of it — more than 380 million cubic feet, or the energy equivalent of more than 65,000 barrels of oil.

Cinco had applied for and obtained flaring permits in August 2012 that allowed the company to flare for 45 days concurrently at two wells. But there’s nothing on file for the other months, and the Railroad Commission didn’t notice the missing permits.

“We firmly believe we had the required permits to do the kind of flaring that we did,” said Cinco’s chief financial officer, Wayne Stoltenberg, who declined to answer questions about the period when Cinco flared gas with no permits on file.

For the 45-day period covered by the permits, Stoltenberg said the flaring was necessary because of well tests and the temporary shutdown of a neighboring gas processing plant.

“We hate to flare,” Stoltenberg said. “That’s money going up in the incinerator. That’s like burning dollars. We hate to do it, but there are instances where you have to. You try to do it as short as you possibly can.”

Porter didn’'t respond to an email request for an interview.

Officials at the Railroad Commission said Cinco failed to follow flaring regulations. On Aug.12, the agency fined Cinco nearly $37,000 for unauthorized flaring.

In La Salle County, EP Energy E&P Co. LP flared or vented nearly 175 million cubic feet of gas, which amounted to 4 percent of its gas production. The Railroad Commission fined the company nearly $26,000 in July.

Nye said officials are considering enforcement actions against three other operators of leases that ranked in the top 20 Eagle Ford flaring sites in 2012.

Matador Production Co. operated three leases in La Salle and Karnes counties that produced 1.6 billion cubic feet of gas — and flared or vented nearly 40 percent of it without applying for flaring permits, according to the commission.

Another firm, Carrizo (Eagle Ford) LLC, flared or vented all the gas it produced at its lease in La Salle County in 2012 — 167 million cubic feet.

The burning and wasting of natural gas is an old problem in Texas.

Decades ago, officials at the Railroad Commission struggled to deal with rampant flaring when oil was king and gas was cheap, much like today in the Eagle Ford Shale.

After years of ineffectively encouraging energy firms to cut down on flaring, the Railroad Commission took the extraordinary step in the 1940s of shutting down thousands of wells in entire oil fields until companies collected the natural gas.

Outraged oil producers sued. But the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Railroad Commission.

“The Railroad Commission got tough. That was a huge shock,” said David Prindle, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the book “Petroleum Politics and the Texas Railroad Commission.”

A growing market for natural gas, the threat of federal intervention and crusading petroleum engineer William Murray helped transform the Railroad Commission into what Prindle called a “conservation tiger.”

Murray, who had worked for the commission and was shocked by the amount of flaring in the Texas Panhandle, was appointed to the board in 1947 and set a new tone at the agency, said Prindle, who extensively interviewed Murray for his book.

Today, no William Murrays at the Railroad Commission are calling for the widespread shutdown of thousands of oil wells. But after the Eagle Ford Shale Task Force published its findings last year, Commissioner Porter announced a “flaring initiative” to modernize state regulations, reduce the waste of natural gas and make sure flaring was an “option of last resort.”

“I’ve directed commission staff to apply a higher level of scrutiny to applications for flaring and venting operations and to shorten time frames for compliance when violations are reported,” Porter was quoted as saying in the task force report.

But at a contentious public meeting in Austin on March 26, 2013, Smitherman expressed his displeasure with Porter for announcing greater scrutiny of the industry without consulting his fellow commissioners, who hadn’t yet read the report.

“I think one of the hallmarks of good regulation is to be consistent and predictable,” Smitherman told Porter. “I’m trying to figure out how you, unilaterally, have directed staff to apply a higher level of scrutiny to these (flaring) applications.”

Since then, no one at the Railroad Commission has taken any steps to revise its flaring regulations. Yet the volume of flared natural gas in the Eagle Ford continued to climb in 2013.

Energy firms wasted more than 35 billion cubic feet of gas that year — a 65 percent increase from 2012, when flaring and venting totaled more than 21 billion cubic feet.

At a recent presentation in San Antonio, Scott Tinker, director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, showed a satellite photo of South Texas from 1994 when the sky was dark.

Then he showed a newer NASA image of the Eagle Ford taken in 2012.

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“You see this city that just got built, as big as Houston?” Tinker asked the audience. “That’s the Eagle Ford. That’s flares and lights at night for the rig.

“For flaring? Really. Can’t we do something different than flare today? That was kind of last century.”